The North Pole, 1981…..Amidst the
deathly silence of an icy kingdom,
meteorologist Alexander Nesterov
is the last man aboard the floating
station Pole 21. He has just received
an urgent message from the mainland
and must leave the vast Arctic
immediately. A comfortable ship will
pick him up at a designated place and
time to bring him back safely, or so
he thinks. Instead of a warm reception
and an easy ride home, the scientist
soon finds himself in a real-life
nightmare when he accidentally boards
the atomic icebreaker, North Wind,
which has been drifting for years in
an endless sea of ice.

From the game message files, the Captain's diary:

The nuclear icebreaker, North Wind, hit an iceberg at 2:16 AM on 24 March 1968. The vessel's bow and starboard suffered heavy damage which resulted in partial flooding of the third deck and damage to the stern's starboard crane. There were no casualties and the ship is currently still afloat. Repairs are under way but may take up to a week...

From the game message files, radiogram to you:

Alexander Nesterov, a junior research assistant at the Pole 21 polar station, is due at coordinates 86°21' N, 74°57' E on 27 March 1981, where he will board the nuclear icebreaker North Wind.

So the whole thing is a paradox, the North wind was an active ship in 1981 but when Alexander meets up with it he finds it wrecked several years ago... He then proceeds to "correct" this and the story then ends as the original radiogram indicated, i.e. he is picked up by the North wind and taken home.

Why wasn't the ship decommissioned as per the radiogram from HQ? well I think the turning point there is with the chief engineer, where he gives the captain the model of the ship he's been working on and says "Here, take it. We'll send it to HQ... Let them disassemble it.".

I think the turning point there is with the chief engineer, where he gives the captain the model of the ship he's been working on and says "Here, take it. We'll send it to HQ... Let them disassemble it.".

u mean at the end of the game?if we are talking about a same place,then what if we chose the other ways to reach the ending?

Maybe it was a Lenin class icebreaker (it was launched in 1959 and taken out of service only in 1989).

text from wikipedia:
When launched in 1957, Lenin was powered by three OK-150 reactors.

In February 1965, there was a loss of coolant accident. After being shut down for refueling, the coolant was removed from the number two reactor before the spent fuel had been removed. As a result, some of the fuel elements melted or deformed inside the reactor. This was discovered when the spent elements were being unloaded for storage and disposal. 124 fuel assemblies (about 60% of the total) were stuck in the reactor core. It was decided to remove the fuel, control grid, and control rods as a unit for disposal; they were placed in a special cask, solidified, stored for two years, and dumped in Tsivolki Bay (near the Novaya Zemlya archipelago) in 1967.

The second accident was a cooling system leak which occurred in 1967, shortly after refueling. Finding the leak required breaking through the concrete and metal biological shield with sledgehammers. Once the leak was found, it became apparent that the sledgehammer damage could not be repaired; subsequently, all three reactors were removed, and replaced by two OK-900 reactors. This was completed in the Spring of 1970.

Details of these accidents were not widely available until after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Lenin was decommissioned in 1989, because her hull had worn thin from ice friction. She was laid up at Atomflot, a base for nuclear icebreakers in Murmansk, and according to Pravda.ru, repair and conversion into a museum ship was completed in 2005.

I think the above theory is largely correct. Alex saves the crew of the North Wind, thus the crew of the North Wind never crashed and still existed in 1981 to pull Alex from the ice. My only issue with this is the setup to to the game relies on Alex rushing to be picked up by a ship that crashed in 1968. I guess it's simply plot convenience that Alex received a dispatch from a separate timeline (the one in which Alex rescues the crew of the North Wind.)?

I still got nothing on the man/men in hooded arctic suits are. I always assumed they were the same person, but as someone else pointed out they are infact different. Also, how does Kronos fit into the story? Was he simply a gatekeeper trying to prevent Alex from messing with the timestream and creating a paradox?

Game manual states that Alex was going to be picked up by 'a comfortable ship' (seems like not the North Wind), but he 'accidentally' encountered North Wind which was drifting in the ice all these years and obviously was not found (or just nobody bothered about it - nothing valuable on board and it's difficult, if not impossible, to reach it).
Men in arctic suits - you mean dead sailors? Or someone else?
Alex actually helps Kronos in the strange fight near the end of game, so it seems that the timeline where North Wind became a nightmare was for some reason wrong (well, it's wrong for sure ) and Kronos tried to set things the way they should be. In the end, player actually chooses how he would correct this (by going along one of the Kronus fingers).

I don't think we are to believe that the crew of the North Wind was stranded in the arctic for 2 decades to rescue Alex at the end. I think you are correct about Kronos but a little off about "the comfortable ship". The ship was always The North Wind, but for whatever reason there was the possibility that The North Wind wasn't going to exist to pick up Alex. A cyclical paradox: The North Wind can only exist to pick up Alex if Alex can somehow influence the events of the past to save the North Wind. In the end they save each other resolving Kronos' dilemma: consolidating the two timelines into one and resolving the paradox.

Edit: I think I may have been too focused on the Why and How of the paradox. I think in most western entertainment/cinema we expect everything to be explained at the end, but this particular story isn't really reliant on the Why or How. I think we are simply to understand that Something occured that resulted in two diverging timelines of which Alex (the player) is the only one capable of repairing. We don't need to know the specifics, only that 1) Alex was to meet the North Wind for pickup in 1980-something 2) The North Wind became icebound in 1960-something. Why or how this happened isn't important to the player, they are simply acting as an agent of Kronos to fix the paradox.

The hooded figure walking around has some serious significance in the story.

He appears in three forms.
The First is coat covered in bloody hands. The second is something that resembles the scales of a fish or dark stones. The third is a antiquated world map. Each of these forms stands next to the main characters at the very end.

Now on a replay of the game, I noticed that the figure with the world map appears right before the second in command officer radios HQ telling them of the captain's incompetence. I think this is supposed to mean that the world is arriving on the ship whereas it was previously isolated from any contact with the outside world.

The game is trying to make a commentary about the problems of humanity and the world. This is also evident when at one point there is a globe trapped in icy chains. It's important to note that this occurs right after the prison scene where you see the world through the perspective of your enemies. The end of this scene has you entering the mind of the guy who is hitting the pan on the floor. You then see the world being formed as we know it today. The events on the North Wind are perhaps meant to mirror the problems of the real world.

The most central theme of the game is the inability of people to understand each other and consequently close their mind to others. You can see this almost everywhere, from the story of Danko, to the infighting between the Captain, the executive officer, the security officer, and the engineer, to the way that each enemy is literally locked inside their mind with a prison of their own doing. Every problem in the game arises from the close mindedness of each character, their inability to understand and accept what others think.

As the Captain says "And so the thin layer of human knowledge cracked under the weight of nature."

I'd just like to add that the fact that Cryostasis' narrative can generate a somewhat intelligent discussion is something that not many video games can claim. I don't think I've ever played a first-person-shooter that has anywhere near the depth of Cryostasis, and it's a shame that more people aren't aware of this.

Iwould simillar to to supply which will that experts claim Cryostasis' story will be able to bring in an important a bit reasonable topic is without a doubt an item a small number of gaming system will be able to allege. As i don't even think I had ever in your life trialled an important first-person-shooter with somewhere outside the amount in Cryostasis, and an important ill at ease which will alot more many people are usually not concious of it.